From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Going After the Poor

Going After the Poor~The Enforcers of Austerity

by David Cronin

The plebs must suffer.

That’s the chilling message – admittedly expressed in less
cogent terms – that powerful businessmen have delivered to senior political
figures in Brussels behind closed doors.

I’ve got hold of briefing notes prepared for a lunch
discussion between a group of chief executives and José-Manuel Barroso, the
European Commission’s president, on 19 February this year. One of the
businessmen’s key demands was that the austerity cuts undertaken across the EU
should be made “more enforceable”.

Representing such firms as Ericsson, Fiat, Telecom Italia,
the software giant SAP and the chemicals manufacturer Solvay, these high-flyers
all belong to the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT). The brevity of
their notes does not conceal their determination to crush ordinary people.

During that lunch, the industrialists argued that the
Brussels institutions should have a bigger say in dictating how each EU
government spends its taxpayers’ money. The ERT knew that it would be listened
to.

Before the financial crisis erupted in 2008, the likelihood
that nominally sovereign nations would send their budgets to an unelected
bureaucracy for prior scrutiny seemed remote. This week, however, Barroso
sounded jubilant as he noted that such checking of budgets has now taken place
for the first time. Echoing his dining companions in the ERT, Barroso warned
against “reform fatigue”. After acknowledging that “huge sacrifices” had been
made, he contended that more are necessary.

It is noteworthy that Barroso hasn’t offered to give up his
pension or his severance pay when he steps down from heading the EU executive
in October 2014. Instead, it is the little people who will be making all the
sacrifices.

I got a taste of the “reforms” we can expect in the
foreseeable future from an ERT paper from December 2012. Marked “confidential”,
the paper argues that the EU should pursue objectives at marked variance with
those set by trade unions (or “some social partners,” as the ERT calls them).

“Modernising labour
market policies and education systems is not about a ‘race to the bottom’, as
some social partners claim, but rather a ‘race to the jobs of the future’
before leadership is claimed by other regions of the world,” the paper states.

A serious reading of the ERT’s demands indicates that the
“jobs of the future” will be precarious. It advocates, for example, that the
Union’s governments should “ease employment protection” by reducing payments to
workers undertaking training or making a transition from one job to another.
And it wants “wage evolution” to be dictated by factors like “international
competitiveness” – this can only be viewed as an assault on indexation schemes
such as the run by Belgium, where pay rises are guaranteed when the cost of
living increases.

The ERT is adept at using code. In June, its chairman Leif
Johansson (day job: running Ericsson), told EU governments that industry was
“confronting a competitiveness battle that threatens the immediate and
long-term ability of Europe to maintain a vibrant, innovative manufacturing
base”.

His prescription for fighting this “battle” is to ensure
that corporations are involved in education “at all levels”.

If taken literally, this means that big business should have
a say in what songs the effervescent staff may sing at the créche my baby
daughter attends. Though Johansson hasn’t gone that far (yet), the ERT has
argued that industrialists should have a role in

managing and setting the
curricula for schools and colleges. It has also argued for greater use of
“public-private partnerships” in scientific research. That is code to giving
big business a greater say in running universities.

Back in 2000, ERT bigwig Gerhard Cromme argued in favour of
the “privatisation of all schools, subjecting them to market forces and thereby
encouraging competition. Schools will respond better to paying customers, just
like any other business.”

It should go without saying that schools are not “like any
other business”. Teaching children to read and write, to share and articulate
is quite different to churning out biscuits or assembling computer chips. In
civilised countries, children with learning difficulties are not discarded on
the basis that they are too slow for the rat race.

The ERT’s fingerprints can be detected on several
initiatives which have shaped recent European history. Indeed, the EU’s
fixation on “competitiveness” – a euphemism for destroying labour standards and
the welfare state – largely originated with recommendations made by the
roundtable in the 1990s. The ERT’s intention was to transform this continent’s
economic policies so that they resembled the rawer version of capitalism found
in the US more closely.

If you think that there is nothing particularly untoward
about lunches between businessmen and politicians, then I recommend you take
the following course of action: call Barroso’s office and ask to meet him for a
pizza. Assuming you are not super-rich, I suspect you might find it difficult
to fix a date. And yet the European Roundtable of Industrialists has no such
problems. So whose voices are heeded the most?

David Cronin is the author of the new book Corporate Europe:
How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War, published by Pluto
Press.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...